Claymore - a pretty cool manga/anime

The story in Claymore was pretty standard: monsters attack people, people are powerless, therefore an organization of hybrids (female warriors carrying deadly claymore swords) emerges to protect people from said monsters. So it's like Blade, in theory. But in reality it has the feel of Berserk (the first cool part, not the crappy lingering mess that it is now). Or you can imagine Naruto, with the monster and everything, fighting against a species of demon foxes. Only without the sillyness and all the mentoring.

I really liked the manga, I can barely wait for it to continue, unfortunately it is distributed like one chapter per month. The 26 episode anime series follows closely the manga story, but unfortunately ends prematurely with a different idea in the last two episodes. Not that it is not a lot better than Berserk leaving us in the dark at the end of the anime or other series that just ended in mid air.

Bottom line, if you liked Berserk, you will like this. If you like Naruto/Bleach, you will like this. I can even throw a little Akira in, to convince you, but it would probably be a stretch :)

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How to return anonymous types from .Net 3.5 methods or how to cast objects to anonymous types

I have found this great link in Tomáš Petříček's blog which gives a very simple and elegant solution to casting to an anonymous type.

Short story shorter:

// Cast method - thanks to type inference when calling methods it 
// is possible to cast object to type without knowing the type name
T Cast<T>(object obj, T objOfTypeT)
{
  return (T)obj;
}

So simple! You see that the objOfTypeT parameter is never used, but the type infered from it is!

Update:
Correct usage:Cast(obj,anonObj)
Incorrect usage:Cast(obj,anonObj.GetType())

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The Temporal Void - Peter F. Hamilton

Wee! Another Peter F. Hamilton book has been published. This time it is the second part of the Void trilogy, an ongoing series set up in the Commonwealth saga universe, but much later. Many characters are rented from said saga, so it would be a good idea to read that one first. Besides, as is Hamilton's style, the second book starts abruptly from the end of the first one and ends abruptly awaiting the third part.

And, again, like in the Night's Dawn trilogy, the plot is a combination of stories, one set in the technological future of mankind and one in a feudal, fantasy like, universe. Hamilton's talent is to combine these two in a believable common narative. They are not so linked as in Night's Dawn and, I have to admit, I like the fantasy arch better, even if it is the classic Messiah myth. Maybe because it is not contiguous, but rather made up of small stories that have a beginning and an end.

Well, either way, it was a great book and I am waiting for the third part, due to be released in far away late 2009 or even 2010 :(

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Oil is not dead yet!

First of all I want to say that I know I haven't been writing many tech articles lately and I've disappointed quite a few of the people reading this blog. I intend to rectify that, even if I am suferring from one of those dry tech spells at the moment :)

Anyway, about the oil. What if one could replicate the process that creates oil naturally, speed it up, and use it to not only for creating oil, but also for getting rid of a lot of organic waste? The technology is called Thermal Depolymerization and is pattented by the Changing World Technologies company. So, if one is to believe the Wikipedia article, while the test factory and the company itself have had problems ranging from technological hickups, to having to pay for the waste they use as fuel up to neverending complains from neighbours about the smell of bio waste, the technique was shown to work!

So, while the process does allow the production of slightly cheaper oil than the one extracted, it will certainly gain a big boost from the increase of prices in underground oil.

Here is a link to a 2003 interview with the CEO of Changing World Technologies, but utterly demolished by Paul Palmer, a chemistry PhD here. Also, this process is nothing very new or unique! there are other methods that are said to transform organic waste to Ethanol, as described in this link. So, oil may not dead yet.

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Sorting LInQ results in a GridView

I had this really old site that I was asked to "upgrade". Net 1.1 to 3.5. So I had to change old ADO.Net SqlConnection to Linq-to-Sql. A lot of unforseen issues. Sometimes it is close to impossible to recreate a simple SQL query without changing the database, as in the case of updating tables or views without primary keys.

Anyway, I got stuck in a very simple issue: How to sort a Linq query based on the string returned by the GridView Sorting event. After a lot of tries and Googling I found it was easier to use third party software (although it's more of a 2.5rd party software, as it is made by Scott Guthrie from Microsoft). Here is the link to the blog entry: Dynamic LINQ (Part 1: Using the LINQ Dynamic Query Library) . You can find there a sample project to download, with the LINQ Dynamic Library inside.

With this library and the OrderBy extension methods the code becomes:

var somethings=from something in db.Somethings....;
var data = somethings.OrderBy(Sort + " asc");
gv.DataSource=data;
gv.DataBind();

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Globalization and Localization for AjaxControlToolkit controls

I had this calendar extender thingie in my site and the client was Italian so I had to translate it into Italian. Nothing easier. Just enable EnableScriptGlobalization and EnableScriptLocalization and set either the Web.config or Page culture settings.

However, the footer of the calendar kept showing "Today" instead of "Oggi". I checked the source and I noticed that it used a AjaxControlToolkit.Resources.Calendar_Today javascript variable to create the footer. Step by step I narrowed it down to the AjaxControlToolkit resources! Funny thing is that they didn't work. I tried just about everything, including Googling, only to find people having the opposite problem: they would have all these resource dlls created in their Bin directory and couldn't get rid of them. I had none! I copied the directories from the ACTK and nothing happened.

After some research I realized that the Ajax Control Toolkit does NOT include the option for multi language UNLESS in Release mode. I was using everything in the solution, including the ACTK, in Debug mode. Changing the AjaxControlToolkit build to Release in the solution made this work.

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Reinvention, a bad or a good thing?

A new (and old) buzzword: to reinvent. It is always a good thing to reinvent yourself, they say, with the effect of relieving boredom and living a "new" life. You may discard bad or useless things in favor of good things. It is also good to reinvent something somebody else did, like a movie. You take the idea, you remove the bad things, you add good things. But, as in the case of the benevolent tyrant, the definition of good and bad is always fuzzy.

Was it good to reinvent BattleStar Galactica? I say YES! It was (and still is, despite screenwriters efforts) the best sci-fi series out there. Of course, that is my opinion. Was it good to reinvent Terminator, incarnated into a teenage girl looking machine? Ahem. But I still watch it. Was it good to reinvent Superman as a troubled teenager? Puh-lease! Come... on! Nah-uh! (See, I address the younger demographic here).

Because, you see, the people that decide what is good and bad in movies are actually the money people. They look at superficial statistics that only show... money! They make abhorent remakes of decent films (like Indiana Jones 4 - The Rape of Indiana) or they turn every hero into man/woman/teenager/animated-character/doll versions that bring nothing new.

In the case of Star Trek, they made the first low budget series than achieved cult level regardless of bad production values and some ridiculous scripts, then they made a sequel (at that time reinvention was not invented yet) where Patrick Stewart redefined the space captain as a cerebral science oriented man, but with lots of guts, then they started the old routine: make the captain black, make him a woman, replace the ship with a station, then with another ship, but in some other place, etc. They even made a prequel, which, for almost a full season, was decent in both interpretation and scenarios. What was missing, of course, was a teenage Star Trek captain. Well, no more!

"Star Trek", the 2009 movie in the making (and no doubt, with a series looming if money are made), features a young Kirk and (what a fallacy) a young Spock! The director is none other than my least favourite person in the world: J.J.Abrams, the maker of such abismal stupidities (but well received by the general audience) like Alias, Lost and Fringe. The writers are Abramses old team, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the brilliant creators of such idiocies like Alias, Fringe and Xena/Hercules!

I am trying to keep an open mind here, but I would venture to guess that the new Star Trek will have big booming sounds whenever something strange happends, will be filled with inexplicable things that will never be explained, except maybe in the movie (but I doubt it, they have to plant the hook for a series) and will have people calling the others by name obsessively, regardless if the need for it arises. So, it may be cool, but I expect to be baktag!

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